Dilemma of Gift

I have seen people wishing for multitude of gifts…the desires varying from the materialistic to esoteric.Yet paradoxically when these have been granted they have failed to honor them. Either they didn’t realize that their wish has been granted or when they did, they didn’t know what to do with it (those). Earlier, I used to be bemused by such an unexpected reaction when the ‘hoped for and the expected arrived’. But no longer. I myself had fallen prey to such inaction when one of my wish was granted…though in my case, unexpectedly. In fact, in my case it was not even a wish but a simple comment…and it pertains to my joining The Speaking Tree family.

It has now been well over three years that I started taking my writing seriously--before that, it was more of a hobby, confined primarily to writing one-liners...that I fondly call my "Quotable Quotes". The flavor of my writing... though has been intrinsically philosophical from the very beginning...yet even within that realm it has undergone a marked deviation.

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So, from Philosophy of Chemistry and Chemistry of Philosophy, it has graduated to a combination of Chemistry, Philosophy, Psychology and Metaphysics strung together by my love for English and kept on track by my search for answers. So however hard it was for me to accept, I had to accept the fact that my writing was a misfit for the ‘normal’ magazines. Amidst such a realization I was struck with another…that Speaking Tree was the only suitable arena for me. I have been an ardent follower of this column, it being the first thing I read in the daily newspaper…and many a times, the only thing. But there lay the cliché...why would I be invited to write in such a column when I didn't have the credentials. This thought put me off a bit...but I continued to work on my book.

And then the unimagined and even the unasked, materialized! The news in The Times of India, dt.14/01/11 that Speaking Tree has become a networking site came as ‘boon from the blue'! I was elated. Just as the saying goes, "when the student is ready, the teacher appears"...so it happened with me in a different context though.

What should have been my response? Definitely joining immediately. But that I couldn't do.

I just didn’t know what to do with this unexpected gift. I don't know why... but it seemed something unseen was holding me back.

I had truly converted the unexpected gift into a dilemma of gift!

I started to think how to write differently from the way I do, my normal style being of narration, in the first person. Too much thinking forced me to think further, which compounded the dilemma. The questions started flooding the mind pertaining to use of “I”. Was not “I” too self-centric? All these because I allowed myself to think that to write in this ‘space’, I had to be different!

But fortunately I got my answer. Primarily, my apprehension regarding my writing style was baseless. And secondly, for me it couldn’t be anybody else, but self as the narrator. Because whatever is and shall be shared here, are all experienced by self. It is my experiences that have made me learn a lot. Experiences, which I consciously and otherwise, chose to experience. Just as the choice of experiencing the dilemma, even after being accorded this gift…of an opportunity to write in the desired ‘space’.

Thus I now know how and why a gift becomes a ‘dilemma of gift’. It is not a ‘gift of dilemma’ that we are gifted with. Instead we on failing to honor and thus utilize it, experience the dilemma…at times catalyzed by too much thinking. It is hence always better to be ‘out of our mind’ at times, as it enables us to envision the picture behind the picture and honor life as a gift…in fact the biggest gift, which we unfortunately have transformed into a dilemma…not knowing how tolive life, the major portion of it is spent in merely spending the life.